The Disastrous Cost of Not Confronting and Not Discrediting the Religious Discrimination Incited and Commanded by the Three Holy Books of Monotheism.
Israel should realize that it is surrounded by millions of enemies due to religious discrimination, led by religious fanatics who may well be willing to sacrifice millions of their own citizens in exchange for the annihilation of Israel whose citizens they greatly outnumber.
This apocalyptic scenario may just be dawning on the Israelis, as Hezbollah and Iran may decide to join Hamas’ war against Israel, trading thousands of missile strikes until there is no more Israel. They will be the last man standing because the number of their citizens is many multiples of Israel’s.
Long ago, Israel and the United States should have realized that without discrediting and delegitimizing the religious discrimination of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran, by invoking the modern morality of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, eventually time would run out for peace, giving way to all out war and destruction. We may have arrived at that point.
Israel and the United States may have envisioned the possibility of such catastrophe, but did not have the courage to undermine the Jews’ biblical justification for the state of Israel, since they did not understand that a much better justification came from centuries of violent anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust, followed by the UN-sponsored “Partition Plan” of British Mandate Palestine, assigning one third to Israel and two thirds to a Palestinian state.
What better survival strategy is there than turning enemies into friends? That would have required sustained gracious acts, while undermining holy book religious discrimination through reasoned discourse about the veracity of the holy books, and proposing a superior morality, the modern one of the Universal Declaration. If it’s not too late today for that strategy, it must be adopted and fully embraced by the Israelis without delay.
Unfortunately, the Israeli government may have walked into a trap. Hamas may have calculated that the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians on October 7 would provoke an extremely violent response, which would then give justification for an all out counterattack on Israel ending in its destruction, no matter the cost to the Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian side. The Muslim leadership believes enormous casualties of their own are acceptable, since they are convinced that all their deceased will be martyrs who will go directly up to their religion’s heaven.
Had the Israeli and U.S. governments considered the possibility of this extreme scenario, the response to the Hamas atrocities of October 7 would have been to stand back and show the world what Hamas did, thereby turning world public opinion against Hamas. Israel could then have the moral authority to address the problem of monotheistic religious discrimination and end what is essentially a religious conflict, not a land conflict.
© Edward Sonnino 2023
November 2, 2023
